"Sodden" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... book; and a little further away a naked child was dipping her toes in a pool of sullage water that had dripped from the broken pipe athwart the house wall. Darkness reigned on the upper floors. At intervals a faint glimmer might be discerned behind the sodden 'chicks' which shrouded the windows; and once the stillness was broken by a voice humming a ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... for hunting, for the swamps were frozen and the foliage was off the trees. The leaves were sodden, and no longer rustled underfoot. Red and gray squirrels scampered across our path, but Willis disdained to fire at them. He was loaded for deer; besides he had but three extra charges. Powder and shot were ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... homeward. The driver checked his gaunt horse at the sight of Colwyn standing on the kerb-stone, and raised an interrogative whip. He added a vocal appeal for hire based on the incredible assumption that a man must live, which he proclaimed with a whip elevated to the sodden heavens, calling on a God, invisible in the fog, to bear witness that he hadn't turned a wheel that night. The phrasing of the appeal helped Colwyn to recall that it was the same cabman who had accosted Philip Heredith ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... a word passed between the two men. The sodden eyes of the tramp were fixed in a sullen gaze on the ...
— Five Thousand Dollars Reward • Frank Pinkerton
... he reached his quarters in the Clarendon and flung himself full length upon the bed, sodden with weariness. For two hours he had tramped the deserted streets, striving in sharp travail of soul to fit the invincible, chance-given weapon to his hand. When he came in the thing was done, and he slept the sleep ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... there for four Mondays, and this was the fifth. The breakfast was about half finished—they had reached the buckwheat cakes—when this maid came rushing into the dining-room and stood regarding them, speechless, with a countenance indicative of the utmost horror. She was deadly pale. Her hands, sodden with soapsuds, hung twitching at her sides in the folds of her calico gown; her very hair, which was light and sparse, seemed to bristle with fear. All the Townsends turned and looked at her. David and George rose with ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... through which the rain was soaking, and pouring off from every point. Everything was wet—everywhere was mud. The water, splashing upwards, saturated the tops of my boots and converted my trousers into sodden sacks. Some weather isn't fit for dogs, but this weather wasn't good enough for tadpoles—even fish would have kicked at it and kept in their holes. Imagine, then, the anomaly! Amidst all this aqueous inferno, this slippery-sloppery, filth-bespattering inferno, a spotlessly clean ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... on the roof, among the ventilators. Here I can see the clouds of steam and the perpetual pall of smoke below me. I can revel in gorgeous sunsets when the fiery light threads the smoke and the mists and the sodden clouds eastward over the lake. And at night I take my steamer chair to the battlements and peer over into a sea of lights below. As I sit writing to you, outside go the click and rattle of the elevator gates and other distant noises of humanity. ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... wood any longer, there were only bare branched trees standing holding out naked arms to the greyness of the world. They looked as if they were protesting against something. The grass and ferns were brown and sodden with late rains and there were no hollyhocks and snapdragons in the cottage garden—only on either side of the brick path dead brown stalks, some of them broken by the wind. Things had not been neatly cut down and burned ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... on me, thou sodden-brained gull?" answered Lambourne, nothing daunted. "Why, dark and muddy as thou think'st thyself, I would engage in a day's space to sec as clear through thee and thy concernments, as thou callest them, as through the filthy horn of an old ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... sodden clothes she was sitting, heedless of every person but the young man standing dumbly beside her. "And I told them I was going to stay with a girl friend out of town over Sunday," she was saying. "And now they'll know. Whether we're drowned or not they'll know. Everybody will know ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... an empty bag, And a sodden kit, And a foundered nag, And a whimpering wind Are more or less Ground for a gentleman's distress. Yet the blade will cut, (He should swing with a will!) And the emptiest bag He may readiest fill; And the nag will trot If the man has a mind, So the kit he may dry In ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... said Dick with a sigh of relief, for it was more pleasant to stand watching the men cutting the peat and the birds flying over, or to idle about the place, than to be dragging along a great sodden mass of pine-root. ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... misty figure in a lap-robe. The rain streaked the mica lights in the side-curtains. A distant train whistled desolately across the sodden fields. The inside of the car smelled musty. The quiet was like a blanket over the ears. Claire was in a hazy drowse. She felt that ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... approach of the Grand Six-in-One Show had, therefore, been heralded to those work-sodden and unambitious persons who tied themselves to their ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Now the Levee, roused from its sodden, day-long slumber, is wide awake. The way between the twin pillars at the Cafe Sinister's entrance is choked with the flood of merry-makers. These newcomers are not so easy to classify as their predecessors. They are the crowd from the street,—the ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... He was quite capable of washing his hands of her, just as he had threatened. And then? Before that possibility Nancy recoiled. No. She couldn't, she wouldn't go back to that old life of squalid slavery—eating bad food, wearing wretched clothes, suffering all the sodden and sordid misery of the ignorant, abjectly poor, a suffering twice as poignant now that she knew better things. She knew poverty too well to have any illusions about it. The Baxter kitchen rose before her. Why! while she was sitting here now, in this luxurious ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... filled with these thoughts, he was almost unconscious of the fact that he was wet through to the skin. He was without an overcoat, it was pawned in London, and he had not yet been able to redeem it. His boots were leaky and sodden with mud and rain. ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... of hundreds of thousands of innocent German children dare to publish such a deliberate falsehood," says "The president." "You are practically sodden ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... supposed to be far above and beyond such emotional signallings, she blushed very prettily. Which merely proves that one may be a diplomaed sociologist with a burning zeal for alleviating the miseries of a sodden world, without having parted with the ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... and temperate air by a more unfriendly climate, form an increasingly intimate alliance with strong drink, until in the so-called gardens of Germany Calliope and Gambrinus are inseparable friends. Farther still toward the Pole the voice of the Muse gradually dies away upon the sodden atmosphere; and she, having outlasted her successive Southern associates, wine and beer, in turn gives place to brandy pure and simple—a beverage itself frost-proof and only suited ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... living in the Midlands, That are sodden and unkind, I light my lamp in the evening: My work is left behind; And the great hills of the South Country Come back into ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... Roger be surly!" So saying, the archer went forth and presently came hasting back with Roger at his heels scowling and in woeful plight. Torn and stained and besprent with mud, his rawhide knee-boots sodden and oozing water, he stood glowering at Giles beneath the bloody clout that swathed his head, his brawny ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... writhing, groaning figure on the floor and saw that, as I had already surmised, it was that of—Svorenssen! He was dressed only in shirt and trousers, both of which, rain-sodden and drenched with blood, were torn to rags by the teeth and claws of the leopard, which was still raving outside and doing his utmost to break adrift from his moorings. The man's injuries, especially about the throat, shoulders, arms, and chest, were shocking; and I felt that, with the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... C. Strong said that the "even distribution of water was very important; otherwise, the ground became sodden in places, and other parts received no benefit. He thought that considerable part of the benefit of irrigation arose from showering the foliage, especially at night, ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... of them pleading voices that get all into you. It wasn't half over before I seen Nettie was strongly moved, as they say, only she was staring at Wilbur, who by now was leading the orchestra with one graceful arm and looking absorbed and sodden, like he done it unconsciously. Chester just set there with his mouth open, like something you see at one of ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... of the shapeless gloom Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down The stale despair of night, must now renew Their desolation in the truce of dawn, Murdering the livid hours ...
— Counter-Attack and Other Poems • Siegfried Sassoon
... meet us, often bringing bottles of delicious milk to sell. They were mostly of the peasant type, large, fair, and stolid-looking. The scenery along the river was dull and monotonous, low, heavily wooded banks, broken now and then by a little clearing. It was a sodden, unkempt, featureless country, and I found myself longing ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... come now to a place where the trail ran steep and the redwoods thickened to make a Californian hillside. It was November, but the season was late. The earth was washed bright by the early rains and not yet sodden with the later ones. The black, shaded loam, bare of grass, oozed the moisture it was saving for its evergreen redwoods against a rainless summer. In the dark clefts grew scentless things of a delicate, gnome aspect—gold-back fern, maiden-hair ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... Sorrow, when she's here with me, Thinks these dark days of autumn rain Are beautiful as days can be; She loves the bare, the withered tree; She walks the sodden pasture lane. Her pleasure will not let me stay. She talks and I am fain to list: She's glad the birds are gone away, She's glad her simple worsted gray Is silver now with clinging mist. The desolate, deserted trees, The faded earth, the heavy sky, The beauties she so truly sees, She thinks I ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost
... bien fini! Allons! Jettez-le!" growled the grim boatswain, dropping his loaded club, as all three spurned the prostrate body, and then, with a heavy lurch, it bounded off the sodden bank ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... at doze sodden wretches, Vhite schlafes of de Witler Rings! From dere 'trunks' you vill your pockets, Und you rob dem like ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 18, 1893 • Various
... the west sprang up an hour before sunset, lashing waves inland until their spray was a salt mist in the air, a mist to sodden clothing, plaster hair to the skull, leaving a brine slime across the skin. Yet Thorvald hunted no shelter, in spite of the promise in the rough shoreline at their backs. The sand in which their boots slipped ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... who will never forget The lowering clouds and the sodden world, But—though you paid as they paid, eyes wet— Your banner of courage was ...
— With the Colors - Songs of the American Service • Everard Jack Appleton
... farewell to Edith Hester some two weeks before. Now it was silent and deserted. The empty frames of a few lodges stood like gaunt skeletons of human habitations, and Donald was gazing wofully at the sodden ashes ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... out to them: weary women who had spent the night in cells, indifferent now as to the front they presented to the world, the finery rued that they had tended so carefully to catch the eyes of men on the darkened streets; brazen young girls, who blazed forth defiance to all order; derelict men, sodden and hopeless, with scrubby beards; shifty looking burglars and pickpockets. All these I beheld, at first with twinges of pity, later to mass them with the ugly and inevitable with whom society had to deal ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... bright, luminous waters of the lagoon, barred with soft lines of violet light and broken with reflections of wall and bell-tower, into this presence of desolation and death. A whole world seems to part those dreary flats broken with lifeless inlets, those patches of sodden fields flung shapelessly among sheets of sullen water, from the life and joy of the Grand Canal. And yet really to understand the origin of Venice, those ages of terror and flight and exile in which the Republic took its birth, we must study them at Torcello. It was ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... bestrewn with the skeletons of elder offspring. In measure, as badinage had previously passed him harmlessly by, it now cut deeply. No one in the entire town thought him a more complete failure than he considered himself. Skies, from being sunny, grew suddenly sodden; not a tenement or alley but thrust obtrusively forward its tale ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... come, wondering, her face sodden with tears, and a miserable little ball of a wet handkerchief in her grasp. The cap'n met her at the foot of the stairs and, without warning, took her by the shoulders and shook her slightly, why, he did ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... comfort of such a vehicle where the roads are practicable, especially in bad weather, when you are perfectly certain that your home is weather-proof and your bed dry. Those who have experienced the misery of a halt in pouring rain, when everybody and everything has been sodden to the bone, when the ground is slush that will not hold a tent-peg; the night dark; the fuel will not burn; the matches expend themselves in vain phosphoric flashes, but will not ignite; the water that has run down your neck has formed reservoirs within your boots; the ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... damned. But this was only for a little while. As he grew drunker the dreams faded and he became a confused spectre, moving in odd crannies of his own mind, full of unexpected devices, harshly contemptuous at best and reaching sodden and dispirited depths. One night in June he had quarrelled violently with Maury over a matter of the utmost triviality. He remembered dimly next morning that it had been about a broken pint bottle of champagne. Maury had told him to sober up and Anthony's feelings had been hurt, so with ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... in the narrow garden, still sodden with rain, though a bold, warm sun shone high to the east. For ordinary he was not changeable, but an Olivia in Doom made a difference: those mouldering walls contained her; she looked out on the sea from those high peering windows; that bower would ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... his brain, meaning to him only a confirmation of the deplorable truth which Sartorius had foreseen. She was, almost without doubt, unhinged: her whole appearance and manner went to prove it. In an agony of mind Roger took in the details of her sodden clothing, her wet, tangled hair, her dreadful pallor. His imagination flashed a swift vision of the poor girl wandering alone in the streets of Cannes for two days and nights. What was this terrible idea that obsessed her? how had she come by it? He spoke to her as ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... being compelled thereunto by vrgent necessity. Shall any man hereupon ground a generall reproch against a whole nation? We reade that in the siege of Samaria, two mothers slew their sonnes, and eat them sodden: 4. King, chap. 6. We reade in the siege of Ierusalem, how lamentable the voice of that distressed mother was, being about to kill her tender childe: My sweete babe, sayth she (for I will report Eusebius owne words, concerning this matter, though very common, that the affection of a ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... side of a steep and rugged incline. Around her chaparral grew thick and high. A late-blooming ratama tree dispensed from its yellow petals a sweet and persistent odour. Adown the ravine rustled a seductive wind, melancholy with the taste of sodden, fallen leaves. ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... weary entry into Katia did the 7th Manchesters present such a sorry appearance as they did when they straggled into Soustre in the grey hours of April 8th. It was an effort to drag one leg in front of another, and our feet were sodden and painful. Almost every particle of clothing and equipment was smothered with red, clayey mud, and thin, tired faces were covered with a many days' growth of beard. Here we struggled into a row of ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... and grief will come later. You just grit your teeth and take a fresh grip of your rifle and go forward with greater determination to strike a blow in the cause of freedom and honour. Maybe you reach your objective, your clothes sodden with sticky, clammy mud and possibly the red of ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... thought illustrates the unfruitfulness of a godless life. There is no correspondence between what such a man does and what he is intended to do. Think of what the most degraded and sensuous wretch that shambles about the slums of a city, sodden with beer and rotten with profligacy, could be. Think of the raptures of devout contemplation and the energies of holy work which are possible for that soul, and then say—though it is an extreme case, the principle holds ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... tired but contented. She even smiled at her sodden fingers—when had Miss Theodosia Baxter's fingers ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... Come into this little park and let us talk." And drawing her hand through his arm, Archie led her into what to other eyes was a very dismal square, with a boarded-up fountain in the middle, sodden grass plots, and dead leaves dancing in the ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... now nearly the end of July. The weather, which for many weeks had been fine and warm, suddenly changed to a spell of cold and wet. Rain dripped dismally from the eaves, the tennis courts were sodden, and the orchard was a marsh. The girls had grown accustomed to spending almost all their spare time out of doors, and chafed at their enforced confinement to the house. They hung about in disconsolate little groups, and grumbled. ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... if you looked Like any human thing this side of death. 'Twas on the night I stumbled on the circus. I'd wandered all day, lost among the fells, Over snow-smothered hills, through blinding blizzard, Whipped by a wind that seemed to strip and skin me, Till I was one numb ache of sodden ice. Quite done, and drunk with cold, I'ld soon have dropped Dead in a ditch; when suddenly a lantern Dazzled my eyes. I smelt a queer warm smell; And felt a hot puff in my face; and blundered Out of the flurry of snow and raking wind Dizzily into a glowing Arabian night Of elephants ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... stood on a bench with the pail in his hand he saw that the cylinder was filled nearly to the top with sodden wood ashes. He poured in the water, and it sank ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... came to shadowed glades where the undergrowth almost hid the track and obstructed her progress, that she found the first clue—snapped twigs and branches bent backward. These suggested the passage of a cumbrous body on wheels, for sodden leaves were pressed into the wet earth and creepers which had barred the way had been torn and flung on ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... gate of the Mill House and walked up the drive. She had come on foot from the station and the exercise had done her good. It had been a deliciously soft balmy afternoon, but with the fall of dusk a heavy mist had come creeping up from the sodden, low-lying fields and was spreading out over the neglected garden of Mr. Bellward's villa as Barbara entered ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... you know," said Angelica; "and ours at Hamilton House are generally nice; but at Morne they're sometimes sodden." ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... body but those of the mind require exercise—exercise in thinking, feeling, and willing. A person who does not read or think loses some of his ability to read or think. The physical worker, for instance, often allows his mind to become dull and sodden. The accountant adds up figures all day and has no chance to exercise his judgment or other mental faculties. In the same way a person who does not exercise his artistic, poetic, or affectional side will suffer its atrophy. The plaint of Darwin that he had allowed his taste for music ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... of making their sups is not uunecessar since our curiosity may cause us make of them at home. Of this we spoke something already. Further he that hes made ready boiled flech, he hath no more ado but to take the broth or sodden water wt his flech and pour it above his cut doune loaves, which we proved to be very nourishing. If a man would make a good soup wtout flech, he would cut me doune some onions wt a lump of butter ether ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... travelling in a soft body. There had been a great deal of rain. On the river levels were flat gleams of flood water. The sky was grey, with glisten of silver here and there. In Wilford churchyard the dahlias were sodden with rain—wet black-crimson balls. No one was on the path that went along the green river meadow, ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... song of the thrush and glints of golden sunshine, but the bright weather was too good to last, and winter again stretched out an icy hand to check the advance of spring. Green daffodil buds peeped through a covering of snow, and the yellow jessamine blossom fell sodden in the rain. The playing-field was a quagmire, and the girls had to depend upon walking for their daily exercise. Their tramps were somewhat of an adventure, for in places the swollen brooks were washing over the tops ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... them are bales of soldiers' clothes. They will be too heavy for us to lift out. They were heavy enough when they were dry, and the three of us could not lift them out, sodden as they must ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... at Pavia, the travellers set forward next morning for the city of Vercelli. The road, though it ran for the most part through flat mulberry orchards and rice-fields reflecting the pale blue sky in their sodden channels, would yet have appeared diverting enough to Odo, had his mother been in the mood to reply to his questions; for whether their carriage overtook a party of strolling jugglers, travelling in a roofed-in waggon, with the younger children of ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... widow. So completely was I transformed from a man into something debased that I went to her house and fell through the front door on the floor dead drunk. The landlady had me carried back to my office, where I lay like a water-sodden log, wholly unconscious, until the next morning. When I awoke I had no knowledge of anything that had happened. My friends informed me of my fall at the house, and of their bearing me back to the office. I upbraided myself bitterly, but it was days before I had ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... a poor people, with neither gold in the ground nor valuable furs in hand, so the whites had passed them afar. Also, the Yukon, through the thousands of years, had shoaled that portion of the sea with the detritus of Alaska till vessels grounded out of sight of land. So the sodden coast, with its long inside reaches and huge mud-land archipelagoes, was avoided by the ships of men, and the fisherfolk knew ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... of rain had cleared off, and the sun shone down on an absolutely sodden ground. Runs would be very hard to get. A lead of thirty-seven meant a lot on such a wicket. An atmosphere of nervous expectation overhung the House. Everyone was glad when the ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... she stood, looking in upon him with dark, luminous eyes; round the small wet face tangles of raven hair fell limp and streaming; dark raiments clung to her form, diapered with sand and sea-foam, sodden with the moisture that dripped from them to the floor; under the hem of her skirt one foot peered forth, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... 115 To special friends, the knot of noose: For 'tis great grace, when statesmen straight Dispatch a friend, let others wait. His warped ear hung o'er the strings, Which was but souse to chitterlings: 120 For guts, some write, e'er they are sodden, Are fit for music, or for pudden; From whence men borrow ev'ry kind Of minstrelsy by string or wind. His grisly beard was long and thick, 125 With which he strung his fiddle-stick; For he to horse-tail scorn'd to owe, For what on his own chin did grow. Chiron, ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... brought that summer from Virginia had long since become old bushes. The Virginia Creeper had climbed to the tops of the trees. The garden, though in the same spot, was another place now, with vine-heavy arbours and sodden walks running between borders of flowers and vegetables—daffodils and thyme—in the quaint Virginia fashion. There was a lawn covered as the ancestral one had been with the feathery grass of England. There was a park where the deer remained ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... some slight attempt was made to institute a patrol of the walls, although the guard that was kept was negligent to the point of contempt. As no enemy was apprehended Morgan did not rigorously insist upon strict watch. Many of the buccaneers were still sodden with liquor and could be of no service until they were sobered. They were dragged to the barracks, drenched with water, and left to recover as best ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Bostil saw the leap of Slone's lasso—the curling, snaky dart of the noose which flew up to snap around Sears. The rope sung taut. Sears was swept bodily clean from the saddle, to hit the ground in sodden impact. ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... we found something. For there were some chests hidden away, and prizing these open, we discovered great books of yellow parchment, so old and so sodden that they fell to pieces as soon as one touched them. They were in some Mongol or Manchu script. They, too, were centuries old. But there was something else—a great discovery. Beneath the books we found helmets, inlaid with silver and gold and embellished with ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... cabin with Captain Alden, the Master faced the insubordinate member of his crew with an expression of hard implacability. The captain stood there determinedly confronting him. His right hand held to the table for support. His left sleeve was sodden with blood; the left arm, thrust into the breast of his coat, was obviously ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... the joint once or twice round his head; I saw it jerked aloft, and then whirling through the air; I saw it falling—falling, till the sodden sound told that it had reached the ground. It was a ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... the lane, by the body of the man in black, sodden now from the overnight hail, and broke into the woods at the foot of the hill. We pushed through these towards the railway without meeting a soul. The woods across the line were but the scarred and blackened ruins ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... rosily far on the eastern rim of the slaty waste the girl sighed and sank to her knees; and Dan, his head reeling with sleep and exhaustion, sank also. When the darkness had all gone and the sun had cleared the horizon, the first level rays flooded the sullen deck of a gray-green hulk, sodden, desolate, and fell upon the faces of a man and woman sleeping, her head resting on his shoulder, strands of her dark ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... worsened as it went on; the wind piled up steadily in violence; and the sea rose till the sodden vessel rode it with a very babel of shrieks, and groans, and complaining sounds. Toward morning, a terrific squall powdered up against them and hove her down, and a dull rumbling was heard in her bowels to let them know that once ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... grandchild, becoming sodden with sleepiness, climbed into Lydia's lap. Sally, after exchanging a conscious undertone with young Joe, slipped through the dining-room door with him, and happily joined the working forces in the kitchen. In her mind ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... the West, where the heavy gray clouds are insistent, Where the sky stoops to gather the earth into mournful embraces, Where the country lies saturate, sodden, round saturate hamlets— ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... to linger, though. A mountain range enclosed the valley, and he had to make it before daylight. He traveled on as fast as possible, with his blistered feet and his sodden blanket and his spearhead, for thirty miles, to a pass that ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... struck down by that severe attack of rheumatic fever, accompanied by great loss of blood, to which reference has already been made. "I got it," he writes to Mr. Maclear, "by sleeping in the wet. There was no help for it. Every part of a plain was flooded ankle-deep. We got soaked by going on, and sodden if we stood still." In his former journey he had been very desirous to visit Matiamvo, paramount chief of the native tribes of Londa, whose friendship would have helped him greatly in his journey; but at that time he found himself too poor to ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... must be—well, inconvenient at times. Now she wants this animal looked after because of Mrs. Lamb; and the squire has some sort of absurd belief that because the same breasts that nursed him nursed our patient, he must befriend the fellow—and he does. Truth is, Rivers, that man's father was a sodden drunkard but, I am told, not otherwise bad. It's a pretty sure doom for the child. This man's body has damned his soul, and now the soul is paying it ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... and unintermitting; thousands were thoroughly drenched to the skin; but the mass only squeezed the closer together, and the excitement of the moment overcame all external annoyances, although the men became sodden, and the finery of ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... whites are white, and not a dirty drab. The streets glisten clean in the sunlight, and every window is a reflector of glad promise. In London, choked with fog, and grimy with soot-dust, the Englishman cannot see the future for smoke, cannot extract a gleam of hope from the sodden, mud-soaked thoroughfares. To be sanguine here on my housetop is to be natural and in harmony with my surroundings. To be hilarious in the Strand is to be unnatural, to court detention in a police cell or a lunatic ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... The Way seemed doubled on the moist August morning; the rising sun merely drew more dampness from the sodden earth; it did not dry it; but at last Sandy saw the opening ahead which marked the clearing around Smith Crothers' factory, he heard the buzzing and warning of machinery—at first he thought it was the strange sensation that was gaining force in his head, but presently he righted things ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... with you when you go to tournaments; it is, like a pair of steel-pointed shoes, a necessary item in your tennis bag. In England, with such variable weather, it is necessary to play in the rain, or at any rate on a wet ground, and with sodden balls; and the very best gut in the world cannot stand rough usage. It is a good plan, too, to take to tournaments at least two rackets as much alike as possible. If anything goes wrong with one, you will have a good substitute, ...
— Lawn Tennis for Ladies • Mrs. Lambert Chambers
... and ruin wrought in one case proved another's safeguard, for the door opened and a miserable wreck of a man entered. As Dennis looked at his blotched, sodden face, trembling hand, shuffling gait, and general air of wretchedness, embodying and suggesting the worst ills of humanity, he decided not to drink for the sake of ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... six o'clock, and sat down at once 'to eat something.' The first course was bread and kirsch; and when that was finished, six boiled eggs appeared, and a quart carafe of white wine. These having vanished, their place was taken by a dish of sodden cabbage, and another quart of wine; but, to save the credit of the maire and the schoolmaster, I will not say how often the former functionary descended to the cellar with a quart pitcher, with increasing impetuosity. ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... see it and grynde it smale wi sodden ayren. do erto gode powdours and hole spices and salt with sugur. make erof smale balles, and cast hem in a batour [2] of ayren. & wete hem in flour. and frye hem in grece as frytours ...
— The Forme of Cury • Samuel Pegge
... Jacinto country from the rest of the valley. The coloring of the floor of the valley itself was particularly exquisite. There was just enough light, just enough of sunbeams struggling through the sodden clouds to illuminate, here and there, an alfalfa field, or here and there a grove of trees, so as to bring them out in startling contrast to the somber colors of the shaded portions of the valley. But with it were signs of the dying year, a premonition ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... groped anxiously for the harp on his back. It still seemed intact in its leather case. He didn't care about the sodden wadmal breeks and tunic that hung around his skin. The sooner they rotted off him, the better. The thought of the silks and linens of Croy ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson
... the flight of the soul had proved as great a fiasco as the first. Suddenly I hit upon a perfectly conceivable (even though it seem a wilfully grotesque) explanation of my failure. What if the human derelicts I had so far chosen for my experiments had no souls to photograph? Sodden with drink, debauched, degraded, and spiritually blurred or blunted to the last degree, these after all were the least likely subjects to yield results to the spirit photographer. I should have chosen saints instead of sinners such as these, entities in which the soul was a major ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... lightly tossed off, but not without its evil implication; and I felt his eyes intently fixed upon me as he sat hunched up on the rail in his sodden sleeping-suit, like some huge, ill-omened ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... again in the book, visiting the 'Puncher' at his work; braving the abominations of 'O.B.D.'s' den, as she made friends with that sodden drink slave and his wife, piloting him to the hall and mothering the first signs of grace in his stupefied soul. We see her mothering the 'Criminal,' weeping over the fall of 'Rags and Bones,' endeavouring to hold ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... courses fight against virtue, that humanity is in its nature a forlorn hope, this was the very spirit that through the whole of Stevenson's work sounded a trumpet to all the brave. The story of Henry Durie is dark enough, but could anyone stand beside the grave of that sodden monomaniac and not respect him? It is strange that men should see sublime inspiration in the ruins of an old church and see none in the ruins of ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... to make a considerable reduction in his farm rents; improvements in his cottage property had led to an outlay for which he well knew he could receive no adequate interest, and, as he had tramped over the sodden land this morning, he had been occupied with the anxious consideration how best to make both ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... every letter. The boy was sleeping in sodden trenches, sometimes without blankets; and instead of grumbling at that, his one grievance was that the regiment was not getting to the front. Heat and frost, hurricane and dust-storm—nothing came amiss. And he described himself as stronger than ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... lowering darkly. On going to the window she found a most depressing change from the scene of bright merriment she had studied the night before. A chill Winter rain was falling with dreary persistence, pattering on the dead leaves that covered the ground, and soaking into the sodden earth. A few forlorn little birds hopped wearily about, searching in vain in the dry husks and empty insect shells for the food that had once been so plentiful there. Up and down the streets, as far as she ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... unusual from his mind, he stepped quickly back to the patient. The younger nurse was bathing the swollen, sodden face with apiece of gauze; the head nurse, annoyed at the delay, bustled about, preparing the dressings under the direction of ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... soul of Grattan as he gave utterance to the spirit of expiring freedom in those orations that rank among the world's masterpieces? The snows of age melted and the decrepitude of years was flung aside, and his eyes gleamed with strange fires as he beheld sodden corruption struck dumb and hang its guilty head; when he saw the wavering drink fresh courage with each new outburst, and men of commonest clay transformed into heroes by the blaze of his genius. Glorious triumphs indeed; but, alas! human, and ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... the commoner rich; in Greek amphitheatres where the laughter rolls away in thunderous waves to be echoed back by distant blue hills; in institutions for the blind; in convalescent wards; everywhere, every time, she makes them laugh. The day labourer, sodden and desperate from too much class legislation, the ego in his cosmos and the struggle for existence; the statesman, fearful of losing votes, rendered blue and depressed by the unruliness of nations and all the vast multitude of horrors that lie in between—all of these, all of them, she makes ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... with perfect ease, for the marshy ground was sodden and took every footprint deeply. That some man had crossed this way, and recently, too, was perfectly plain. The footprints wavered a little that was all, showing that the man who made them was uncertain upon his feet. And Wynne had left the ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... ground sloped, and the troop descended from the heights by a road flanked with dripping pinewoods, black and melancholy, that for a while screened them off from the remainder of the sodden world. Thence they emerged near the head of the bridge that spanned the swollen river and led them directly into the town of Regoa. Through the mud and clay of the deserted, narrow, unpaved streets the dragoons squelched their way, under ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... opened about 8 P. M.; but the provisions being so salt and sodden with the sea water, they could not be eaten, on account of the scarcity of fresh water. After the watch was set we laid ourselves down upon the upper-deck with no other covering than the ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... and the pair roamed towards the centre, gazing curiously at so much of sodden vegetation as the fog allowed them to see. Their eyes were not jaded; to them a blade of grass was not a ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the verandah, which is the invariable addition to New Zealand houses, stood, bareheaded, a tall, gaunt figure, whose rain-sodden garments clung closely to its tottering limbs. A more dismal morning could not well be imagined: the early dawn struggling to make itself apparent through a downpour of sleet and rain, the howling wind (which one could almost see as it drove the ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... as thought the girl slipped to the ground, and taking Brownie by the head began feeling her way along the narrow shelf. Dead leaves, tangled grass and ferns, all wet and sodden, made a soft carpet, so that the men behind the rock heard no sound. Now and then the lightning revealed a glimpse of the way for a short distance, but mostly she trusted blindly to her pony's instinct. Several times she stumbled over jagged ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... nothing in the story; and yet you will understand how much there is, if one chose to set it forth. You see, she was so ugly; and you know there is something terribly, miserably pathetic in a certain smile, a certain sodden aspect of invitation on such faces. It is so terrible, that it is in a way sacred; it means the outside of degradation and (what is worst of all in life) false position. I hope you understand me rightly. - ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... down and squirmed mightily, and once his gleaming teeth snapped into an arm, bringing a howl of pain and several minutes of cursing. The unexpected resistance, once the surprise was over, infuriated the rum-sodden men. One of them yelled: "Sock him; Shorty!" A ray-gun's butt was slapped down on Friday's head; the negro rolled over, stunned. Then he was picked up without resistance and borne out into the night, where fantastic figures ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... spoke the words; Her life had not been a long one. She had laughed a great deal, but she had never been happy. She knew Abel from old days. She saw him now, sodden, bloated—but he fascinated her still. Was he the magician to ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... perfected his plans for overtaking them by swift messengers to be sent out from the Mission at the earliest moment, and then he turned his horse upstream toward Springvale. All day he rode with all speed to the northward. The ways were sodden with the heavy rains, and the smaller streams were troublesome to the horseman. Night fell long before he had come to the upper Neosho Valley. With the darkness his anxiety deepened. A thousand chances might befall to bring disaster before ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... of battle, Might of quelling, Ill of war-deeds, Sating of foul ravens! Sodden ground, blood-red; Men low in dust; ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... roused himself from his stupor, and the astonished landlady heard his shuffling step on the stair. She followed him softly and curiously to the front door, and watched him. He was bare-headed but had not far to go. The night-flare of the cheap, all-night saloon across the sodden street silhouetted the stooping figure for a moment and then the swinging doors shut the old man from her view. She returned to her parlour and sat waiting for his return until she fell asleep in her chair. She awoke at two o'clock, went to his room, and ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... you to realise it, and you may put it into as modern English as you like, for it will help the vividness of the conception, which is a simple, prosaic fact, that Jesus Christ was, in the broadest meaning of the word, a pauper; not indeed with the sodden poverty that you can see in our slums, but still in a very real sense of the word. He had not a thing that He could call His own, and when He came to the end of His life there was nothing for His executioners to gamble for except His one possession, the seamless ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... woman he had fancied her was a spotless white lily. The heart of this one was banded with bars of flame and gold. The other grew colorless and cold by comparison, and his hands twitched to pluck this fiery, vivid thing before him and carry it away out of reach of Lorimer's sodden, defiling touch. What had Sidney Lorimer, drunkard, profligate that he was, to do with this high-bred, high-spirited, heart-broken woman? Why not rather he, Cotton Mather Thayer—He thrust his hands into his pockets and lowered his eyes to hide the ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... kitchen stairs sounded the rush of sodden feet, which seemed to stumble from sheer weariness even in their maddened haste; and the next instant there burst into the room what looked like a wretched caricature of poor Susanna. Bonnetless and spectacle-less, her gray ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... have mind of me, hid there among the bushes, and sodden and cold; and yet, as you will perceive, so held in my spirit by an utter terror and loathing and solemn wonder and awe of that Mighty House of Quietness loomed above me in the Night, that I wotted not of the misery of my body, because that my spirit was put so greatly in dread and ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... wives. The men are hobby-riders. They have just one interest and that usually small and dull—stocks or iron or real estate or hunting or automobiles. Our women are not like the English women—stupid, sodden. They are alive, acute. They wish to be interested. Their husbands bore them. So—well, what is the natural temptation to a lazy woman ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... oysters should never be thickened by stirring in flour. It spoils the taste, and gives them a sodden and disagreeable appearance, and is no longer practised ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... even so. The coarse, hard-grained canvas, with the dull sodden mass behind it, answered me with ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... freedom, negligently, confidentially,) for one day and night at least, returning to the naked source-life of us all—to the breast of the great silent savage all-acceptive Mother. Alas! how many of us are so sodden—how many have wander'd so far away, that ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... a hoarse, inarticulate cry; a swift, maddened scrutiny that searched the sodden scene of the ambush; then he was down beside the mare, calling her name heartbrokenly, his arms around her neck, his face against her warm, wet, ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... the doorway, passed out, and the light of the sky streamed into the cabin again. Carley sat staring. She heard Ruff's spurs tinkle, then the ring of steel on stirrup, a sodden leathery sound as he mounted, and after that a rapid pound ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... have been able to pursue the Russians it would have required a frost to harden the ground which, on the contrary, was now so soft and sodden that one sank in at every step, and several men, notably the batman of an officer in 7th Corps, were drowned with their horses in the mud. It had now become impossible to move the artillery and to venture further into this unknown territory; besides which the ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... neck to ankle, better perhaps in his legs than anywhere. Besides, you can see by the clear white of his eye and fresh bright look of his skin, that he is in tip-top training, able to do all he knows; while the slogger looks rather sodden, as if he didn't take much exercise and ate too much tuck.[9] The time-keeper is chosen, a large ring made, and the two stand up opposite one another for a moment, giving us time just to make our ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester |
